About the development and entrepreneurial opportunities in the Crypto payment industry:
1. Currently, the distribution of stablecoins has a two-tier structure:
The first tier consists of stablecoin issuers and primary distributors. The more bank channels the issuers have, the greater the number and types of primary distributors that can perform KYC.
The second tier includes exchanges/brokers (with regional fiat deposit/withdrawal and C2C platforms), Crypto payment apps, and offline OTC networks. This tier will transmit KYC to a broader user base, even spreading to anonymous (cash) channels. Exchanges primarily serve crypto users, while other channels cover more payment/settlement/gray market fields.
2. Currently, traditional Fintech is backward-compatible with the Crypto ecosystem. This field has large companies as gatekeepers, and entrepreneurial opportunities are minimal. Similar to how Visa/MasterCard/UnionPay allow Crypto to be integrated into their payment card networks, companies like PayPal/JD issue stablecoins and use their own scenarios for cold starts. Blackrock/Franklin Templeton/Hua Xia are utilizing Tokenized Money Market Funds and Treasury to facilitate crypto trading/settlement scenarios, with these directions being compliant/legitimate, making it difficult for grassroots entrepreneurship. Supporting AI agents to use stablecoins and smart contracts for payment/management of funds is one direction.
3. Finally, stablecoins are penetrating the cracks of the global financial system between gray and white, as compliance/sanctions/capital controls/underdeveloped infrastructure/severe inflation/small government begin to voluntarily embrace the Crypto payment market, which is fragmented and consists of localized developing countries, the third world, and marginal silent communities. This direction has a large population but lacks good statistical data, field research, and commercial integration. There are huge business opportunities hidden within.
The occasional media coverage of Huiwang is just the tip of the iceberg. If entrepreneurs choose to enter this space, they must select cities with a large distribution of OTC shops, such as Hong Kong, Phnom Penh, Istanbul, and Buenos Aires, to conduct research and explore upstream and downstream business model simulations.
